Palmyra Atoll

Palmyra Atoll is one of the Line Islands, located one-third of the way between Hawaii and American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean. The island was first sighted in 1798 by an American sealing captain from Connecticut, and USS Palmyra was shipwrecked on the reef on 7 November 1802. Captain Cornelius Sowle, the captain of the Palmyra, reported that there were no inhabitants or any fresh water located on the island, but that there was an abundance of very large coconuts and fish of various kinds surrounding the island. In 1842, the island was visited by a scientific expedition, and the United States claimed the island in 1859; the Kingdom of Hawaii formally annexed the island on 15 April 1862, and the island would change hands multiple times. At one point, Japan briefly colonized Palmyra, one of its most distant colonial possessions, nearly wiping out the native Polynesians on the island. In 1889, the United Kingdom claimed the island, but the island was taken over by the United States in 1898 as a part of Hawaii's annexation; Palmyra was officially a part of Hawaii. From 1934 to 1959, the US Navy occupied the island, and an air station was present on the island during World War II, being built in 1941 and being demolished in the years after the war. It is currently an organized incorporated territroy of the USA, the last part of the USA to have this designation. In 2017, it was inhabited by between 4 and 20 staff and scientists.